Editorial 1/2015

CESSDA Engaged in Building Services

Sami Borg

The Finnish Social Science Data Archive is as a national service provider for the European CESSDA research infrastructure. This consortium has at present 14 member states and one associate member state. More members are expected to join shortly. CESSDA is well on its way to become one of the most extensive European research infrastructures.

CESSDA provides high quality and free-of-charge data services. Its data catalogue holds metadata on more than ten thousand datasets. At present, data can be accessed through national service providers, but in the future it will become possible to download data online as is already possible for data archived at the FSD."

The main office of CESSDA is located in Bergen, Norway, and training activities are coordinated from Cologne, Germany. Norway and Germany are the major funders of the central services of the infrastructure. The creation of central or joint services has begun in earnest this year, so the next few years will be very busy. The FSD aims to take an active part in the building of such services, as this is a good way to provide maximum benefit to the Finnish scientific community and our national services.

CESSDA has recently launched its new website cessda.net. Particularly useful are the training pages covering research data management and data archiving issues. The new website is extensive in content and technically modern and easy to use, for which we owe our thanks to our colleagues in Bergen.

Sami Borg
Director